Totally out of curiosity, what do the bees do with the wax capping off the flow frames after we’ve harvested.

I will try to remember to take a photo tonight through the observation window. Looking at the flow frames the day after I harvested and yesterday a good solid week and a half after harvesting and the flow frames now look totally brand-new, no wax extension or capping’s anywhere. Totally totally surprised.

Back in September I wrote about the wax scales that were so prominently displayed in a photo by Debbe Krape of Delaware. Since then Zachary Huang, a bee researcher at Michigan State University, sent me the following photo of a "normal" set of w [...]

last time we harvested- we watched as the bees started furiously uncapping the cells- even whilst the honey was flowing out. We have a few tiny gaps between the frames at the back- and the bees were pushing little flakes of wax out through the gaps. Other flakes were falling down into the hive- and bees were carrying bits away.

We removed the frames after we drained them- we put them out beside the hive over the next few days and the bees cleaned out the honey dregs- and uncapped more cells. But after a few days there was still quite a bit of wax cappings left- and we have stored the frames over winter- they look very messy. Very interesting to see just how thoroughly the bees cleaned up your frames - but only the cappings- so the cells are perfect and ready for immediate refilling?

It seems as if flow frames would offer an advantage to the bees in not needing to produce as much wax between harvests- and being able to recycle the cappings too? It takes a lot of honey to make wax. It seems you can harvest honey with virtually no loss of wax to the hive- I don’t think there is any other harvest method that does this?